A Computer-aided Framework for Detecting Osteosarcoma in Computed Tomography Scans
Authors: Maximo Rodriguez-Herrero, Dante D. Sanchez-Gallegos, Marco Antonio Núñez-Gaona, Heriberto Aguirre-Meneses, Luis Alberto Villalvazo Gutiérrez, Mario Ibrahin Gutiérrez Velasco, J. L. Gonzalez-Compean, Jesus Carretero
Organizations: Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, Departamento de Informática, ARCOS, Avenida de la Universidad, 30 (edificio Sabatini), 28911 Leganés (Madrid), España · Instituto Nacional de Rehabilitacion “Luis Guillermo Ibarra Ibarra”, Mexico City, México · SECIHTI - Instituto Nacional de Rehabilitacion “Luis Guillermo Ibarra Ibarra”, Mexico City, México · Cinvestav Tamaulipas, Cd. Victoria, Tamaulipas, México
Osteosarcoma is the most common primary bone cancer, mainly affecting the youngest and oldest populations. Its detection at early stages is crucial to reduce the probability of developing bone metastasis. In this context, accurate and fast diagnosis is essential to help physicians during the prognosis process. The research goal is to automate the diagnosis of osteosarcoma through a pipeline that includes the preprocessing, detection, postprocessing, and visualization of computed tomography (CT) scans. Thus, this paper presents a machine learning and visualization framework for classifying CT scans using different convolutional neural network (CNN) models. Preprocessing includes data augmentation and identification of the region of interest in scans. Post-processing includes data visualization to render a 3D bone model that highlights the affected area. An evaluation on 12 patients revealed the effectiveness of our framework, obtaining an area under the curve (AUC) of 94.8% and a specificity of 94.6%.
Figures & tables
Figure 1: Proposed framework for identifying osteosarcoma using CT images.
Figure 2: Automated pre-processing pipeline applied to each patient’s CT scan. From left to right: raw CT image with scanning table artifacts, result of morphological opening using a disk-shaped structuring element (radius = 10px), binary mask obtained via Otsu thresholding, and final selection of the two largest connected components representing the leg region.
Figure 3: Slice-wise bone extraction pipeline applied to pre-processed CT images. From left to right: Gaussian smoothing ( σ=2 ), K-means clustering with k=5 , selection of the brightest cluster to isolate bone tissue, and final binary mask after morphological closing and hole filling outlined on the pre-processed CT scan.
Figure 4: 3D model output of the framework for an osteosarcoma-positive patient, shown from two different viewing angles. The red bounding box delineates the predicted affected region.
Primary bone tumors are rare but clinically aggressive neoplasms whose diagnosis from radiographs is challenged by heterogeneous morphology, subtle lesion margins, and overlapping bone structures. To address the limitations of existing single-view models, we present a dual-input, multi-task learning framework that, to our knowledge, is the first to apply bidirectional cross-modal attention between a lesion crop and the full radiograph for joint segmentation and subtype classification. Using the multi-institutional Bone Tumor X-ray Radiograph Dataset (BTXRD, n=3,746), we employ a YOLO-based detector to generate regions of interest, which are paired with full images as inputs to a dual-stream DenseNet121 architecture. Features are integrated via a novel cross-modal attention fusion strategy, refined by Hierarchical Multi-scale Feature Fusion, effectively balancing fine-grained lesion detail with global anatomical context. Evaluated on a held-out patient-level test split, the model demonstrates superior performance over single-input baselines, achieving an overall Dice Similarity Coefficient of 0.896 and a macro-averaged classification F1-score of 0.928. Notably, the system exhibits exceptional sensitivity for malignant osteosarcoma (AUC 0.999), validating the potential of dual-stream context modeling to support radiologists in accurate, early decision-making.
S. M. Nasif Uddin, Rusab Sarmun, Muhammad E. H. Chowdhury +3
Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Ahsanullah University of Science and Technology, Bangladesh · Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, University of Dhaka, Bangladesh · Department of Electrical Engineering, Qatar University, Doha 2713, Doha, Qatar +1
Breast ultrasound imaging is an important noninvasive method for early breast cancer diagnosis, but automatic benign/malignant classification remains challenging due to tumor heterogeneity, blurred boundaries, and data imbalance. To improve feature representation and classification accuracy, this paper proposes the Cross-Stage Attention Mixture-of-Experts Network (CSA-MoE-Net). It adopts a Cross-Stage Attention-enhanced ResNet-18 as the backbone, in which the Cross-Stage Attention module adaptively recalibrates multi-level features, thereby enhancing key tumor features and suppressing redundancy. A three-branch Mixture of Experts (MoE) Block learns complementary features from the Whole Tumor Image, Tumor Core, and Boundary, and an Adaptive Gating Network fuses them to capture morphological, textural, and contextual information. The fused features are denoted as Fused Expert Feature (FEF) in the architecture. Experiments on a balanced dataset of 2,129 breast ultrasound images show that, averaged over 20 independent runs, the model achieves an accuracy of 96.33%, precision of 94.09%, recall of 98.53%, F1-score of 96.25%, and AUC of 99.50%. Compared to the baseline ResNet-18, these metrics improve by 3.01, 0.70, 5.37, 2.98, and 5.42 percentage points, respectively. The proposed mechanism requires no invasive modification and can be seamlessly embedded into VGG-16, DenseNet-121, etc., yielding stable performance gains, thus providing reliable support for computer-aided diagnosis.
Bowel obstruction is a common and potentially life-threatening gastrointestinal condition. In the face of rising diagnostic workloads, the automated diagnosis of bowel obstruction on CT scans supports radiologists by accelerating detection and improving patient outcomes. In this work, we propose a deep learning framework with a multi-task objective that jointly detects bowel obstruction and localizes its transition zone. Additionally, we extend the method with an inherently interpretable classification method that locates the suspected transition point within a slice. It does so by learning a probabilistic selection mask that faithfully bases the classifier's prediction solely on a small image region. The proposed method is evaluated on an internal dataset comprising 1,427 abdominal CTs. Here, the model achieves an obstruction detection test accuracy of 93% and a Hit@10 transition zone localization of 95%. As the first method to reliably localize the transition zone, this marks a significant step towards the automated identification of this critical clinical landmark.
Moritz Vandenhirtz, Andrea Agostini, Dana Belde +5
Department of Computer Science, ETH Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland · Department of Radiology, Kantonsspital Baden, affiliated Hospital for Research and Teaching of the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Zurich, Baden, Switzerland · Department of Forensic Medicine Zurich, University of Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland